by Rachel Kushner

As Contributor

Rachel Kushner

The only writer to ever be nominated for a National Book Award in Fiction for both a first and second novel, Rachel Kushner is clearly an author to watch. Kushner began her Bachelor’s in Political Economy at the University of California, Berkeley when she was only sixteen and went on to obtain an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. She published her first novel, Telex from Cuba, in 2008. Kushner has edited for Grand Street Magazine, BOMB, Soft Targets, and Artforum, among others. Her fiction and essays can be found in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Paris Review, and frequently focus on issues of feminism, contemporary art, revolutionary politics, culture, and modernism. In 2013 New York Magazine called Kushner’s second book, The Flamethrowers, “probably the most heatedly discussed book of the year.” For this title Kushner was a finalist for the 2014 Folio Prize, the James Tate Black Prize, and the Bailey’s Prize. She was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2013 as well as an honorary PhD from Kalamazoo College. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son.

The three pieces gathered in The Strange Case of Rachel K roughly map the genesis of Rachel Kushner’s fiction. From the fate of a conquistador in “The Great Exception,” to the illegal radio broadcasts and then bombs in “Debouchment,” to a Havana courtesan’s “strange” case, these stories build into a vision of Cuba that is black-humored, brutal, and beautiful.
In this collection, which “overflows in atmosphere as it shows off the burgeoning talent of one of our best writers” (NPR), Rachel Kushner is forging her own original path into the wilds of contemporary fiction.…

Malina invites the reader on a linguistic journey into a world stretched to the very limits of language with Wittgensteinian zeal and Joycean inventiveness, where Ingeborg Bachmann ventriloquizes—and in the process demolishes— Proust, Musil, and Balzac, while filtering everything through her own utterly singular idiom. Since its original publication in 1971, Malina remains, quite simply, unlike anything else; it’s a masterpiece. Malina uses the intertwined lives of three characters to explore the roots of society’s breakdown that led to fascism, and in Bachmann’s own words, “it doesn’t start with the first bombs that are dropped; it doesn’t start with the terror that can be written about in every newspaper.…

New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin (1914–1997), then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies. “I asked Ezra Pound for ‘career advice,’” Laughlin recalled. “He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. He urged me to finish Harvard and then do ‘something’ useful.”